I am woefully aware that the subtitle of this book review might sound like a LinkedIn post; leaving literary readers aghast and corporate employees puzzled. After all, “Karukku” by Bama – the memoir of a Dalit Christian woman largely taking place in a village called Pudhupatti, in Tamil Nadu – is the farthest thing from business and the corporate world. The book details the caste discrimination that Bama and her fellow members of the Parayar community faced. It features no glistening metropolitan cities nor easy-to-digest bullet points on how to fastrack your way to corporate leadership. But this memoir about how caste determines the distribution of power in the village, led me to closely look at spaces in my work through the lens of caste, accessibility, and gender. 

Let’s look at how village spaces are described in “Karukku”:  

“To the left there is a small settlement of ten to twenty houses, known as Odapatti. It is full of Nadars who climb palmyra palms for a living. To the right there are the Koravar who sweep streets, and then the leather-working Chakkiliyar. Some distance away there are the Kusavar who make earthenware pots. Next to that comes the Palla settlement. Then, immediately adjacent to that is where we live, the Paraya settlement. To the east of the village lies the cemetery. We live just next to that.”  

As Bama continues to write about the village, it becomes clear to the reader that physical spaces in the village are intertwined with different castes that occupy them.  

These lines, talking about this intertwining especially, drew my attention to how much space matters in the politics of inclusion. One way that they are linked is through accessibility: the presence or absence of structural barriers to our ability to make use of a particular space.  

When we talk of accessibility, we usually look at barriers that are physical in nature. But spaces have a social dimension to them. In “Production of Space,” the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argues that space is a social product which affects spatial practices and perceptions. He writes extensively on the sociology of everyday life. According to him, everyday life is the place for “reproduction of the relations of production.”  

Existing social hierarchies are reinforced through space. To put this in simple terms, think of Downton Abbey. The lords and ladies live in the lavish “upstairs” rooms, while the servants occupy the cramped “downstairs” rooms. Now, think of our office complexes in 21st century India, in a world far away from 20th century England where most of Downton is set. We have separate entry and exit points for blue-collar and white-collar workers, and we pass these almost every day without much thought. Even leisure spaces are segregated. Employer branding materials featuring recreational rooms and other amenities seldom feature any blue-collar staff. The answer to the question of “why” of segregation lies in how we think of caste, and pure and impure spaces. Is this segregation different from the one Bama and her community experiences in her village? 

One way in which the experiences are different is the extent of the hostility – and the caste oppression – that Bama faces, which follows her even beyond the limits of her village.  

“When I went home for holidays, if there was a Naicker woman sitting next to me in the bus, she’d immediately ask me which place I was going to, what street. As soon as I said, the Cheri, she’d get up and move off to another seat. Or she’d tell me to move elsewhere... They’d prefer then to get up and stand all the way rather than sit next to me or to any other woman from the Cheri."  

In a city like Mumbai, reading the above paragraph, it is possible to say that such practices are a thing of the past and certainly not something seen in bustling metros. But the thing is, whether it is apparent or not, caste permeates into our everyday interactions. Maybe you and your organisation are inclusive. But does that inclusion translate for your blue-collar workers and contractual staff? Again, let’s think of the office cafeteria. Do you and your housekeeping staff or the security team dine in the same places? Can they occupy leisure spaces at work, like table tennis and carrom breakouts in the recreational room, like you do? Is the worker who is constantly mopping the floors of your lobby given the opportunity to rest at reasonable intervals? Where do the housekeeping staff sit between attending to their tasks? Is that place ventilated and well-lit? Does the staff have that designated space or do they make-do in office corridors? 

Conversation about inclusion must attempt to understand spaces and look at the politics of who accesses them. And how before transforming the workplace, we must all reckon with our implicit biases about the way spaces are divided – including DEI practitioners.  

If we are to change the corporate world for good, in addition to examining existing relationships among the workforce, we must inspect the workplace itself — and not just the workforce. Works like Karukku help illuminate the biases in our social fabric and compel us to create avenues for creating a diverse, equitable, and an inclusive world for us all.